Step right up, kids. (NY Post)

A lot of bombast has been spread on both sides of the great Barclays Center battle of the past decade, but Andrea Peyser manages to take the cake as she always does, along with the amazing "photo composite" the Post put together of Bruce Ratner as ring leader. Cue Ms. (or is it Madame?) Peyser:

When Barclays is christened this fall as home of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, Ratner will have pulled off the seemingly impossible. Almost single-handedly, he’ll have brought the Borough of Kings, long neglected and overshadowed by Manhattan, back to buzzworthy health.

“A young person can go to Brooklyn to see hometown [rapper] Jay-Z. A family who lives in the projects will walk here or take the bus. This is the soul of Brooklyn.’’

The buzz is back! But not without alienating the poor, project-dwelling locals. How about those $30 tickets for all! Without this, there would be nothing but needles littering the borough's beloved brownstones.

When I toured this site in 2004, it was a disgrace. It was scarred with toxic rail yards that had squatted on this spot, like a disease, for decades. Then I spied a pile of hypodermic needles.

It was long past time to breathe air back into Brooklyn. Or shut the lights and get the hell out.

Brooklyn 2.0: We'll leave the lights on for you.

Scene from "The Thing," which isn't happening for real in the Antarctic right now. We hope.

Contrary to somewhat overheated reports from Fox News regarding their mysterious silence, scientists with Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute are probably just very busy. The Russian team has been drilling through 13,000 feet of Antarctic ice to reach subterranean Lake Vostok, a body of water that hasn't seen daylight for 20 million years. On Thursday, an article published by Fox News seemed to leave open the prospect the scientists might have reached their goal and perhaps awakened some horrible evil from beyond time and space:

A group of Russian scientists plumbing the frozen Antarctic in search of a lake buried in ice for tens of millions of years have failed to respond to increasingly anxious U.S. colleagues -- and as the days creep by, the fate of the team remains unknown.

"No word from the ice for 5 days," Dr. John Priscu -- professor of ecology at Montana State University and head of a similar Antarctic exploration program -- told FoxNews.com via email.

U.S. News and World Report says Dr. Priscu's dire seeming words were misconstrued:

"I can assure you that they are not lost or out of contact," he wrote in an email. "I never said the Russians were lost."

[...]

"What I can tell you is that they are doing something that has never been done before—think of it, sampling a lake under 2.5 miles of ice at a location that is the highest, driest and coldest desert on our planet," he adds.

So we can relax--dread Cthulhu has not wakened from his timeless slumbers to consume the intrepid Russians for disturbing his dark and eldritch dream-time. Dr. Priscu assured U.S. News that Russian team is simply "working round the clock" to complete their historic mission and reach the buried lake before the brutal Antarctic winter arrives.

Though it would probably be good to know if they do check in, soon. Just in case.

[US News and World Report]